21 July 2013 12:23 AM

Trident missiles are useless (unless we're prepared to point them at Brussels)

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

It would do us no end of good to get rid of our Trident nuclear missiles. It is time we stopped pretending we were a great power.

I should say here that I was a keen supporter of our nuclear deterrent in the days when the communist Soviet Union menaced Western Europe with its enormous army.

That is exactly why I don’t support it now. We won that war, which was a colossal game of bluff. Modern Russia poses no military threat to us, and isn’t even very interested in us. Nor is China, which has plenty to occupy her in Asia.

The real danger to this country comes from our supposed friends in the European Union and the USA, who have successfully subjugated and bullied us without a shot being fired.

The EU makes our laws, plunders our territorial seas and decides our foreign policy. The USA compelled us to surrender to a gang of armed criminals operating from the Belfast back streets and the hedgerows of South Armagh.

We are forbidden by Brussels to control our own borders, so opening them to socially and economically destabilising mass immigration.

Meanwhile, our proper Armed Forces are sacked or scrapped – HMS Ark Royal lies this week, a sheer hulk, in a Turkish scrapyard with her innards on display.

What use is a fleet of four super-expensive submarines, crammed with missiles we could never use anyway and which we almost certainly don’t control, against any of the real threats to this country? Precisely none.

If North Korea or Iran ever do become nuclear powers (which is open to doubt), why should they bother with us, a third-rate country thousands of miles away? It is a delusion of grandeur to imagine that they care. All these futile rockets do is soothe us into a false sense of safety, and spare our national leaders from having to think about what they are really supposed to be defending.

Trident keeps us, government and people, from realising just how urgently we need to reform ourselves if we are even to survive as a country. Dump Trident, and face the truth.

Last December I wrote these words about the pitiless killing of Alan Greaves in Sheffield: ‘A gentle, kindly man could not walk safely from his home to his church.

His wife’s casual goodbye to him turned out to be a final farewell. The horrible, diabolical injuries he suffered suggest that his assailant’s mind is in some way unhinged, quite possibly by the drugs which we have effectively legalised in our pursuit of pleasure at all costs.’

Well, the culprits of this killing are now known. Jonathan Bowling admitted murdering Mr Greaves. Ashley Foster was convicted of his manslaughter. Bowling used a pickaxe handle on Mr Greaves’s head. Both men then ran away laughing.

Both men were cannabis smokers, as I predicted. The liars and dupes who continue to defend the covert legalisation of this terrible drug, and to claim that it is ‘soft’ and peaceful, have much to answer for.

A perfect portrait of our rotten hospitals

When this was still a free society, it was run by independent-minded, well-educated, confident people who knew what they were doing, took decisions and accepted responsibility.

Now we are a cut-rate people’s republic, as full of regulators, snoopers and inspectors as the old East Germany. We despise good education as ‘elitism’, are scared of rigour in training, ceaselessly undermine the authority of professionals, and prefer rules to initiative.

That is why the NHS does not work. The excellent Left-wing journalist Jenni Russell, a capable person who you might have thought would be able to secure reasonable treatment, recently eloquently described the position. Admitted to hospital in an emergency, hoping she was at last in good, firm hands, she found instead that she was in the iron clutches of a moronic, bungling, obstructive robot.

‘Nothing in my life has made me feel as helpless and uncared for as the week I spent in an NHS hospital as an emergency admission two summers ago’, she wrote. She was denied drugs she needed. She was not fed. She waited seven hours for a bed. Her blood test was – dangerously – mixed up with someone else’s.

‘Everything around me went wrong, consistently, so that having gone into hospital with a sense of tremendous relief – thank God, somebody is going to look after me now – I spent my days in a state of frightened hyper-vigilance, frequently in tears, as one muddle followed another.

‘The worst of it was that it was not just me who felt impotent in the face of an incompetent system. The hospital staff, many of them very well-meaning, told me they felt the same.

‘None of them, from nurses to sisters to consultants to managers, had the authority or understanding to cut through the errors and make the organisation work.’

All MPs, doctors, nurses and journalists should read her account. Yet it will change nothing, because nobody will admit that the Left-wing dogmas that have wrecked this country are wrong.

Don’t let Dave’s doll make a dummy out of you

This week we are told in simpering newspaper articles that it is Samantha Cameron’s soppy simple-minded view of foreign policy that is driving our mad desire to arm Syria’s cannibal rebels.

And a photographer is wonderfully on hand when Samantha’s husband steps out clutching a doll’s pushchair.

They do this sort of thing because they think you’re gullible and easily manipulated. You don’t have to fall for it.

A Commissar without a clue

As a former Trotskyist, I’m always amused to see Tory politicians actively pursuing the revolutionary policies I and my comrades used to campaign for. Having no ideas of their own, these vacuous careerists have no idea that they are in the grip of Marxoid beliefs.

At least Labour politicians, many of them unrepentant if coy ex-Trots and ex-communists, understand that they’re wrecking the country and why. But Maria Miller, Commissar for Culture and Equalities, plainly hasn’t a clue.

When she wrote to the BBC demanding further persecution of a sports presenter for uttering an unfashionable thought, she didn’t even know that she was committing a constitutional outrage.

How can anyone not know that governments in free countries don’t try to tell journalists and broadcasters what they can or cannot say? Still, the fault is also partly ours for submitting to having a ‘Minister of Culture’ in the first place.

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Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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Mr Hitchens,
Re: Trident
Your comments about Brussels and the EU are correct, but Trident deals with a completely different set of problems.
If we, as a nation, decided to , we could leave the EU tomorrow. The EU could do nothing to stop us. We would be free of them and their poisonous influence.
If, on the other hand we were confronted by a military enemy, armed with biological or nuclear weapons, deciding to not deal with them any more would not get rid of them. They would still be there, and they might fire their weapons at us. Then an awful lot of us would be dead, and the survivors would probably envy the dead.
Nobody has yet come up with a better defence against a nuclear or bio weapon threat than having a nuclear arsenal of our own. I believe that there is a lot of research going on in particle physics, to produce an invisible dome over a country, which would vaporise nuclear missiles as they touched it. However, there would still be a threat from nuclear weapons in lorries, or even rucksacks.
As to us not being important enough for Iran or China to want to attack us, what if they decided to do so for fun. Hitler and Stalin both enjoyed murdering millions of people for fun; suppose a nuclear armed Hitler decided to destroy us in the same way that a sadist tortures animals, or humans, for pleasure?
As for the doubt that we control our nuclear arsenal: until 1957, the americans resolutely refused to share any nuclear weapons secrets with us. In that year we detonated our own Hydrogen Bomb in the Pacific, and in the same year the russians launched Sputnik. The americans desperatelely needed british scientific know how to stop the russians turning the Moon into a nuclear missile base.
We have always had an independent nuclear deterrent since the 1950s because we had no choice. The americans refused to help us with it. Having built our own, why would any british government, however perverse, hand control of it to the americans.
it is quite possible that the EU will make a serious attempt to take control of the british nuclear arsenal. In that instance, we will find that the French will be our allies. There is no way that the French will give up their nuclear arsenal. Having lost their country for four years in the 1940s, they have a deep committment to having the final word in an invasion threat from another country. Yes, I know they are pushed around by Germany, but that is their choice. They could say no if they decided to . In 1940, they could not say No to Hitler strutting through Paris.

"They are just acting on their wiring that gives them inner urges.... and will get angry and set out on patrol in blogs and try to be personal."

Angry and personal, Bob? Surely not, if so I would have used the 'bonkers' word long ago!

William

Just a potential voter? Having appeared to desert Bob's Better People Party, aka the BNP, in favour of that other lot you mentioned, it might not be long before the wiring expert has words of advice for you...

mikebarnes - like yourself and several other posters, I come to this blog to discuss the reasons for the willing and eager ongoing suicide of this nation, as we allow a malicious sub-group, which is the Left, to gain the upper hand.

The suicide of this nation is a common theme of Peter Hitchens' columns. I come here to join that discussion. We need to work out why the rich and powerful persons on the Left in parliament, the BBC, local government, academia, why they have an inner strong motivation to do things to this nation that are not in the interests of the wealthy or the poor - eg to increase the levels of crime and drug use and to dumb down education. Eg to remove better persons from positions of authority in hospitals, even in the knowledge that they too are likely to be ill in hospital one day and receive cruelty and neglect due to a policy of not employing better people to be in charge, rather using equality and diversity and industrial tribunals to pick the kind of person to be in authority in all places run with public funds.

Clearly the poor suffer most from such policies, especially the policy of making sure personal character qualities are not the criteria for promotion in an NHS hospital.

Another example of their malice that needs to be explained is why they seek to run our economy off windmills rather than using the hundreds of years of fracking gas we possess. The only explanation is a malice for this country so intense that the knowledge that they too will partake of the misery they seek to cause does not deter them. For a malice that is even more intense than self interest we need a powerful explanation. I favour an explanation that does not involve good or evil, just aspects of animal behaviour that are part of our wiring and explain aspects of human behaviour just as the same concepts of wiring explain why dogs form groups and view other dog groups as their main enemy. The dog does not know why it behaves as it does, and neither do the Left. They are just acting on their wiring that gives them certain inner urges.

It is inevitable that when you refer to the suicide of this nation, those who are keen for it to proceed at full pace will get angry, and this will make some of them set out on patrol in blogs and try and get personal with those who object to our national suicide.

mikebarnes – the boring one milks the fact that he and Peter Hitchens and the BBC share the same view of the BNP. William puts him in his place 22 July. Alan Thomas seeks to get personal rather than contributing to the debate. That is his style.

@ Bob son of Bob
The usual suspect is in the picture again. " and were I to respond ", well he did respond ,and is correct .Boring in as much as he doesn't have opinions .Just lambasts those who do.
Now that to me is a background noise. Hitchens as usual gets it all wrong.

@ adeledicnander.
Your post shows up the very point I am arguing . LOONY left gives an impression of madness. Unfortunately these folk have their grubby hands on power. Through deceit lies and that march through the institutions. Not mad or loony at all. Driven by an ideology totally alien to the western soul. SICK more like it. But never the less hard left bent on the destruction of the West,

Very wavy indeed it seems. Again, I'm more interested in the actual issues than the internal electoral strategies of independent political parties - that's for them to sort out. Sorry old fruit, you'll have to ask them . I'm just a potential voter I'm afraid.

I have been saying for years they are useless unless we are prepared to point them at Brussels, or rather Strasbourg before entering into any more negotiations in which we are being persuaded to hand over sovereignty.

It is all very well for politicians to allow themselves to be corrupted by flatteries and for none to be heard making a chirp as the borders of the nations are removed, but that is the problem, the naivety of career politicians that represent the fifth column within and sadly no nuclear deterrent will work against them.

"These privileged and wealthy Lefties cannot be envious of the poor onto whom they seek to impose crime, drugs, and dumbed-down education."

No, maybe not but it's in their interest (and how cynical this sounds) to see that such envy is used as a means of eliciting sympathy for left-wing philosophy. It might explain why nobody ever really challenges 'equality and diversity' or feel it strange that we have a 'Minister for Equalities', as though we're all somehow supposed to assume that these things in themselves are A Good Thing!

I remember Mr Blair once boasting that Britain had become more equal under Labour (whatever that means) as though he'd somehow robbed from the rich to give to the poor (only the dumbest Labour voter would've likely fallen for it)!

It's kind of insulting that Labour politicians come out with such drivel and expect it to be believed. Still, maybe they're right- after all, they did win three elections (I still wonder whether they were frauds but I suppose we'll never know)!

‘Left’ and ‘right’ usage and context were, until recently, clear. But, as has been said here previously, that a leader of the Conservative Party can advocate and enact a bill which once would have been recognised universally as a policy of the farthest of the loony left demonstrates the extent to which the loony left meme has gone viral.

Joshua Wooderson, thanks for querying my post which I admit could easily be (mis)construed as merely: desiring to wield a hammer over other participants heads during negotiations!

Instead, I meant to convey that that Britain is a minnow in today’s world, and we should retain every ounce of competitive advantage if we are to make it to the end of this century as an independent nation (…I’m not wholly pessimistic, and beyond this century, I actually think the world will develop the technologies to ‘engineer’ a peaceful Star Trekkian existence for all). However, I do admit to being a cynic regarding the ‘game’ of international politics/economics. And so, much like the game of poker, the winner of this game is not necessarily the player holding the best hand; much is about perception and ‘front’. ‘Fronting’ things out, as I explain above, until the end of the century, is crucial. So it’s not about ‘wielding’ such weapons and like any good poker player, Britain should keep its deterrent-threat firmly in its hip pocket.

Should we, for example, willingly give up our seat at UN’s security council? This ‘token-asset’(is it?) - along with the nuclear deterrent - our English language, system of law, specialist financial industries (even in their current state), etc, are I believe crucially important differentiators, that will help enable a small nation like Britain to ride out the 21st Century Asian Tsunami of politics and economics.

I’m not a believer in ‘peak’ oil/gas. And the recent shale gas story (both here and in America) will I think add further fuel (forgive pun) to the whole argument over how experts should in future factor in the world’s so-called ‘uneconomic energy reserves’. I expect clean water to be harvested from desalinated sea water; and food protein perhaps from the very aptly-named ‘meal’worm.

However, this is where my earlier point expressing cynicism for international politics/economics kicks in. In totality, there may be enough for all - but control of these basic resources is not evenly distributed and more importantly, I don’t see the supply of these huge infrastructure projects fitting the demand (out by many decades probably). For example, America will probably become self-sufficient in its energy requirements, particularly if its Alaskan oil projects pay-off. Its exports will be cheaper to sell, while China is already experiencing price inflation for its own products. Chinese manufacturing labour costs are rising and China will be importing a far higher proportion of its energy needs. China may resort to gaming the international system (though unfortunately nothing as subtle as poker this time).

It will be the global competition between nations for these ‘scarce’/unevenly distributed resources that will present the problems. China has an increasingly insatiable middle class to satisfy unless it wants a revolution on its hands. Up to now it has merely purchased foreign land, mines, etc. However, it also has a large navy and very ambitious territorial claims. I’d suggest this is a politically toxic situation.

Thanks for your reply. However, it was very much a summary of your highly repetitive descriptions of those you blame for the sins of the world around you, and, were I to respond, I suspect you would find my views equally as boring. I used to think you were involved in teaching, but now presume your unequalled ability to set NHS staff into your neatly labelled boxes might mean you are employed alongside those whose efforts - or lack of them - you describe.

However, should I assume your verdict on the leader of the BNP as one of the 'better people' gains him your support? As I don't expect an answer, and it's probably none of my business, I shall assume it does.

I wish I had known of the Hepworth's existence. We visited Wakefield last Sunday to visit the museum (I enjoy viewing Charles Waterton's bizarre taxidemy exhibits) but it was closed so my view of Wakefield was jaundiced somewhat by having to kill time in the city centre and walking through some grim urban areas in order to visit the chancery chapel.

I must add that I love West Yorkshire my good lady was born in Northern Ireland but raised in Upton near Pontefract as her father hailed from there and went back to work in the mines when we still had a coal industry in the UK. Some of the rural surrounding areas are breathtakingly beautiful and I think my abiding love of the area and it's people contributed to my sadness at the urban decline I witnessed there since my last visit as I usually just visit Leeds, York and the Dales when I go over to visit family in Upton.

Can anybody tell me what that involved, in practical terms? Decommissioned? Put beyond use? What did those vague terms actually mean in practice? At the time I searched in vain for details but it seemed as though a thick fog of obfuscation and euphemism hung over the news reports in the media who accepted these facile assurances without asking any detailed questions. I can't help feeling that if the weapons really had been destroyed properly (melted down?) we'd have been told as much in clear unambiguous language. Maybe I missed an episode, but did we ever find out what was actually done?
In fact, in 1998 if anyone punctured Blair's artfully managed euphoria by having the temerity to question any aspect of the Good Friday agreement they were likely to be booed and hissed by a combined media clacques' chorus and accused unfairly of not wanting the peace process to succeed. I well remember the frisson of shock and horror which came over the studio audience when our host expressed his unfashionably off-message take on these events on BBC TV's Question Time some fifteen years ago. Plus ça change!

Alan Thomas - those you mentioned are better persons. To give you examples of what I mean by better persons and lower types: An extreme example of a lower type person is one who can strangle a child for pleasure and then can sit in prison with no remorse. Or a judge who earnestly seeks to release these types back into society. Only different wiring from normal persons can explain this phenomenon.

Another example of better persons and lower types: a lower type nurse sees a patient who is thirsty, does nothing, and goes to the nurses' station for a chat. There are many such persons employed by the NHS. A better person is one who would not do this. I suggest the difference is in their wiring, just as the difference in behaviour between the pitbull and the labrador is in their wiring too. A left-dominated society such as ours cannot stand giving authority to better persons based on their personal character, so the better-person matron who in the past would have sacked the cruel nurse, is no longer allowed to. The lower type nurse would go to an industrial tribunal. Besides, there are fewer better types in positions of authority in the NHS these days anyway, as the promotion criteria have been changed from personal qualities and virtue to the new ones of loyalty to equality and diversity.

The mystery we have to explain is why so many persons on the Left feel an instinctive urge to increase the authority and dominance of the lower types in our society, and we have to explain why these urges are so strong amongst the wealthy and privileged Left who have the most to lose when they do to their own country that which they did to S.Rhodesia, S.Africa, and which they hope to do to Israel within their lifetimes. These persons are united in the Western countries, which is why it is so pointless of Peter Hitchens to talk of 'American interest' and 'British interest'. The Left in both these countries are not concerned with national interest, except to undermine their own and any other nation they see as a civilising influence in the world. There are more in our own country acting against our own interest than in the USA acting against our own interest.

Mark - hi. Mark writes "those on the Left seem to base their entire philosophy on the envy of others."
Yes, there is envy, and I do not dispute your comment, but it is not the whole story. Eg consider also the wealthy judge, whose children go to Oxford, or the wealthy Radio 4 presenter, who has private medical insurance. These privileged and wealthy Lefties cannot be envious of the poor onto whom they seek to impose crime, drugs, and dumbed-down education.
And how can envy explain the Left following the AGW agenda, which will lead to power cuts, when we have hundreds of years of gas and coal that we could use? The ones pushing most for this - the BBC, the academics, media people - they are amongst the highest paid and have the most to lose when their shares collapse when national bankruptcy arrives. Amongst these persons, malice is more of a motivator than envy.

"Please stop repeating the nonsense that we "surrendered" to the IRA. The peace process in Northern Ireland saved many lives - maybe your own.".

Perhaps when you stop repeating the nonsense that we didn't. We could easily have defeated the IRA, it really was that simple except that nonentities like James Callaghan, John Major and Tony Blair didn't possess the will to do it or they preferred to do what the Americans told them to do.

A Libertarian Socialist – forgive my ignorance, but why would possessing nuclear weapons lend us any more clout in economic deals? Short of a threat to reduce Washington to rubble unless it agreed to stay on side, I fail to see how the two could be connected.

As for the ‘scramble for resources’, ‘experts’ have been predicting shortages and population crises for years, and have invariably been proven wrong. Which shortages do you foresee occurring in the near future, and how will the wielding of a nuclear arsenal (the use of which would be so clearly counterproductive as to render its existence a fairly empty threat) serve our interests in this respect?

In reply to adeledicnander.
Thank you for your post, My question was of course rhetorical. For the rreason the left are described as *liberal left " soft left is purely to deceive. Just as these people pay lip service to us by deceiving their roots in communism.
Journalist like Mr Hitchens use theses floppy descriptions for reasons only he knows. The left as Bob s,o,b describes are anti nature,anti nation, So anti everything, they even turned out to protest those who supported the national outrage, at soldier Lee Rigby's death.
At the same time the LIBERAL LEFT as Hitchens would have us believe, are at this time in support of the murderers of that tragic lad. As prison officers are questioned over the injuries received in prison.
There is no difference between the soft left and the rabid left. They all sing from the same hate sheet.

When Europe was menaced by the Red Army the IND ( Polaris as it was then ) was not at all ' independent ' ( the missles could not be fired without express American permission ) , was rarely ' nuclear ' and was not at all a ' deterent ' to the Kremlin. Yet billions were spent trying to butter up the Americans to the detriment of - amongst other things - our surface fleet and ' non bomber ' submarine capacity.

Good to hear from you, Mark, and glad to see you haven't melted - the southern branch of my family all seem to think it's time for a stay in Yorkshire for some reason...

"Those on the left seem to base their entire philosophy on the envy of others..."

Well, I would certainly agree that some might, just as some on the right seem to base their entire philosophy on the forces of the market, but this is where the use of left and right without the use of qualifying adjectives can lead to all sorts of issues. Hence my usual comment to Bob, son of...

William

One final question, if UKIP is a move in the right direction - that is right as in 'correct' - has the BNP lost the plot? The fellow who founded UKIP appears to think they've been infested by all sorts of unsavoury types, and Mr Farage is quoted as saying that he would not wish to see ex-BNP members joining UKIP, but then, that is the answer one would expect from any party leader who has expectations...

Sorry if that's 'off thread', William, but most threads weave a wavy road, do they not?

@ mikebarnes, 21 July:
"The hard left William speaks of . Would they be the same liberal left Hitchens calls them . Its all a bit like being a little pregnant .Being a little on the left. Perhaps Mr Hitchens or one of his many sycophantic followers could give me an accurate measuring device to explain the difference. For I as a background noise am easily confused as to the difference . Insomuch I cannot see any difference. Hard left, soft left . Just adjectives used to confuse. Those that might be confused as soft left are not left at all but fools."

'Rethink' by Gordon Rattray Taylor, published in 1972, re ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ (p32):

"Our Matrist Age. When we look at the contemporary scene [early 1970s], we can see very easily that ALL these criteria, without exception, indicate a marked shift to wards matrism, and of course most noticeably in the young, who are the coming generation.

"Right and Left. Basically, we see a political battle between two types of hard-ego mentality, patrist version and the matrist version, when the battle the public is interested in is between is the battle between soft-ego and hard-ego mentalities. As the reader will probably recall, the patrist believes in preserving the status quo, believes in a hierarchical social system, is repressive as to sex and morals, thinks things are getting worse. The matrist is permissive, egalitarian, more interested in food and welfare than sexual morals, and believes things are getting better. The hard-egoist believes in the struggle for success between independent individuals, the soft-egoist in a sense of community, in being rather than doing. When we come to apply these concepts to actual political parties, naturally the position is not so clear-cut, for historical reasons. Thus in Britain, the hard-egoists gradually ousted the patrists from power around the beginning of the [20th] century, but the label Conservative (which obviously implies patrist) has been retained to disguise the fact that, like the Republicans in the USA, it is now a business (or 'success') party. (p216).

"Political Closed Shops. The present system has the effect of producing a political closed shop; as a result, the existing parties can lose touch without losing power. People may vote for them 'because the others are worse' or may vote for whichever party is out of power on the grounds that it may undo some of the harm by the party which is in. Or they may sink into apathy, declining to vote at all. Actually, citizens, though they seldom realize it, have one recourse: spoil their voting papers. (p226).

I read a piece in the Guardian (not my usual reading- I detest that loathsome left-wing rag) on the issue of sexism and the calling for further punishment of that commentator from the (don't you just love this job title?) Minister for culture, media, sport, women and equalities (what on earth would you do in a job like that?).

It's the creepiest thing I've read in a long long time...when a Tory politician is being cheered on by a Guardian writer then you know something has gone badly wrong...

Hi Alan

Hope you're well- Bob son of Bob has a point- those on the Left seem to base their entire philosophy on the envy of others.

Now, whether Messrs Griffin et al belong in the superior group is not for me to say (although I do like Nigel Farage- there's a great video of him on youtube humiliating Mr Blair, who, when confronted with all his miserable betrayals had to resort to his usual "we're not living in 1945 anymore" speech to try and wriggle out of it).

It's not so much that others are superior, it's just that the Left tend to like to disguise their selfishness by parading their tender consciences and have to resort to name calling when engaged in any form of discussion. Labour voters (at least modern Labour voters) tend to be people who think the world owes them a living (love Mark Twain's comment that the world owes you nothing, it was here first). Check out Andrew Klavan on youtube- some great videos on liberal/leftie stupidity and left-wing debating style (for serious want of a better word), and a great one on multiculturalism.

Cripes, Mr Alan Thomas has risen! (But then again we can recall, in his very own words , he regards himself as being "always at the ready" ). Who was provoking who?I forget ...

Anyways Mr Thomas, I have little interest in your attempts to shift the grounds of the thread. My only concern is loss of national sovereignty, freedom, pride, culture/identity and the steady creep of a Leftwards tyranny (ie the EU arrest warrant). If you are able to consider the actual issues, as opposed to, say, try and smear political views you don't like, you may yet have something worthwhile to contribute .

Peter Hitchens writes: ‘What use…. super expensive submarines’?.... I beg to differ - even with the £100Bn price tag, the projected cost over its predicted 50 years lifespan (with anticipated upgrades), this works out at £2Bn/year. Broadly in line with what the nuclear deterrent has cost in the past as a proportion of the total defence budget, thats to say, 4-5%.

The unique effectiveness of Trident is that of its firing tragectory, i.e. ‘stright-up-then-down’, as opposed to the ‘land hugging’ cruise missiles. Therefore, once launched into the earth’s atmosphere, Trident missiles can not be effectively shot down (unlike cruise) - because by the time that they have been detected - they are already heading back toward earth and their target. For those that say that our nuclear deterrent is not truly independent as it requires American codes, sent to the submarine commander, in order to activate the missile before any launch can happen, neglect to mention that this part of the American system was not implemented here and British submarine commanders are able to arm their missiles without having to receive codes. Of course there is nothing stopping us developing our own system.

Who will be our future enemies? Surely, no one knows the answer to this, though I note that PH’s own list includes only the usual suspects of Iran, N. Korea, etc. But curiously he neglects to mention the USA - even though PH himself attacks the USA in this same article for bullying the UK into political settlement/surrender with the IRA. I’m not predicting any great worsening of future relations between our two countries. However, I can imagine a tripartite ‘economic discussion’ between USA/China/India happening in the coming decades. And with Britain possessing such weapons, it may just help keep the USA on(-our)-side. That’s the hysterical conspiracy argument dealt with(?). How about practical politics - after all, over the next 50 years, most experts predict world-wide shortages and a scramble for resources. The emerging middle-classes from say China, and from the Middle-East, will be impatient for consumer-driven economic progress. Such national competitions for resources could turn violent. It seems to me to be a particularly perilous time to cancel our insurance policy against these events. We are not a super-power, but let us at least try to put ours-selves at the top-table with the other ‘main players’.

I can't speak for Doncaster, but any decline in Wakefield is more than made up for by the splendid (and free!) Hepworth Gallery. "Mesmerising and Moving' wrote the Mail On Sunday when describing the William Scott Exhibition. I spent a morning there last Friday with my 19 year-old grandson - one of those cool dudes up from the Smoke - and he was most impressed. Yes, like most places the shopping centre has suffered, but there are still some very pleasant residential area, and I understand the high security prison is still doing well...

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